--On Saturday, March 8, 2003 4:16 PM +1100 davidsless wrote:

> Worse still are the research reports
> that do not include reproductions of the actual designs. In these cases
> the practicing designer can form no judgement whatsoever on the visual
> designed quality of the work. In my view any researcher trying to give
> designers practical advice on the basis of poor or 'invisible' examples,
> should not be taken too seriously.

I could be totally off the mark here, but let me say, at least where my
double audience (Humanities and Design) is concerned, problems relating to
genre conventions may contribute to the writer's dilemma.

If I include visual information within the body of the text, which I do, I
may run the risk of not always being taken seriously by the more word
centered portion of my audience. You may say, why worry about them, but in
my area of interest, words and visual information contribute equally. I do
not know who will want to hire me once I defend, but if it is an English
department, I need to be persuasive with that audience. For that group (and
I am not talking about everyone in the humanities, but a group that is
large enough to concern me), the examples should be in an appendix. That
audience rightly expects the words to show I know what I am talking about.
They are right in terms of the genre, but those genre conventions undermine
my argument.

A recent job talk I attended left me baffled when the speaker discussed her
interest in the "visual language" of paintings in the early 1900's without
ever showing an example of that language. She was a rigorous researcher
from one of the best universities, but she was hamstrung by the set of
assumptions her committee held concerning visual information. For them, the
argument must be made in words.

So, I think the problem may sometimes be an audience problem. If I appeal
to one side, I may lose the other. In order to offset that possibility, I
have recently ordered a book, "ALT DIS: Alternative Discourses and the
Academy" Christopher Schroeder (Author), et al, which I hope to use to
argue what some may see as peculiarities to my approach.

What I hope to get across here is my belief that while I agree, some work
should not be taken seriously because it has nothing to offer, other work
may be full of promise, just not yet persuasive.

Thanks for letting me, a poor student prone to "spirals of abstraction"
join in. Please forgive me, but it's late, I have the boyfriend problem,
and I could not resist. Perhaps I have had one to many "Big Mac's."
Pittsburgh, a wonderful, but underrated city, is the place they were
invented.

Susan Hagan

..............
Susan M. Hagan
Ph.D. Candidate Rhetoric
Student: Masters of Communication Planning and Design
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213

[log in to unmask]